As of Friday, residents can search by zip code, licensee name or restaurant name to view inspection histories.

Health officials say they conduct over 5,000 annual inspections.

All current notices and those from the past three years are now on the department's website. Health department staffers are continuing to add past inspections to the online system, but all new reports will be made available to the public as soon as they are processed.

Government transparency is good. In this case, transparency shows that DC's food inspection program seems to be pathetically unprofessional and unhelpful.

Browsing through the inspection reports posted online, I see nearly illegible handwritten inspection forms that give no specific indication of what was wrong or how to fix it. If this is all the inspectors leave behind, a manager who wasn't present at the time of the inspection would be very hard pressed to figure out exactly what was wrong. The public reading these reports also has no idea.

DC.gov is to be commended for putting these reports on line, but now they need to take the next step and make the inspection reports detailed, legible, and informative.

Now that I've looked at several more reports, I see that several of the inspectors take great pains to produce detailed and readable reports that are very useful. Other inspectors don't seem to be quite as diligent.